Engagement Marketing Fever - Are Marketers Finally Catching It?

Engaging a customer base is of course a very important part of social media. It is vital, truly, to the overall success and long-term growth of a given company/brand’s following and fan base in the social media space.

That is the opening paragraph to an article I wrote just the other day on Social Media Today re: a case study article about Atlantic Station, one of the biggest outdoor mixed use malls in the entire country, and how they are seeing the fruits of their engagement labor and then some. They are engaging their customers and prospects via social media and have seen their sales rise more than four times the national average.

Now, being the creative advertising fanatic I am, I often put a given topic in the context of advertising and in this case, television.

Raise your hand if you're old enough to remember this commercial:

Put your hand up in the back, I know you remember this spot. This incredibly cheesy and quite lame attempt to equate being a fan of America's pastime to having some sort of illness that you a) cannot get rid of and b) don't really want to get rid of.

Can't you just see a TV commercial featuring ad agencies and marketing consultants and the like espousing the virtues of engagement marketing? Or better still a celebrity spokesperson doing it for them.

And man do I have the perfect guy for the job. Just replace "cowbell" with "engagement marketing."

Now tell me that wouldn't go viral.

Anywho the reason for my optimistic title stems from the findings of a couple of recent surveys conduced by IBM and Multichannel Merchant.

From the recent IBM survey of more than 1700 global CEOs. Look at the wide disparity when it comes to using social media as a means to engage now vs. how it is projected to be used in the next 3-5 years.

Of course I would rather see that higher engagement number now rather than waiting until 3-5 years down the road, but I'll take it for it is a step in the right direction.

Another step, and in this case it is a step that has already taken place unlike the aforementioned 3-5 year step, is this finding from the Multichannel Merchant survey.

Up from last year (68.9%), is the percentage of companies (74%) indicating they use social media to engage their customers. That is certainly good news as companies realize the importance of engagement marketing for their overall and ultimate success.

However, there are two additional aspects of the above finding I want to briefly touch on.

The first one is to take note of the decrease in companies using social media to prospect for new customers. This one kind of threw me for a loop because to me, if engagement marketing is done correctly, the prospecting of new customers should happen at the same time, at least theoretically.

If you are truly engaging consumers - which would include customers as well as prospects, you should be at the same time identifying/prospecting prospects, if you will, no?

The other piece of the above finding that caught my eye was the first result, the one about monitoring. You'll notice a significant increase in the number of companies using social media to monitor what is being said about them. This finding flies directly in the face of something I wrote about just last week in which I made reference to a recent study by Satmetrix that showed just 17% of US-based companies track, or monitor, what consumers are saying about them in social media.

I guess Multichannel Merchant and Satmetrix used a slightly different pool of folks to survey, wouldn't you?